31/08/2017
One rainy afternoon, a few weeks into my trip to Africa in May 2011, I was moved to craft a little-stuffed zebra doll for a nine-year-old orphaned girl I'd met named Witty in Tukumbo Village. I was haunted by Witty because she’d seemed so devastatingly sad and lonely. As I hand-stitched her name onto my little zebra creation, I realized I was infusing it with all the love and compassion I felt for her and all the other vulnerable women and children I'd met in my travels in Malawi.
My spontaneous “animal crafting” inspired my co-travelers as well, and soon they were not only creating their own animals to give to the orphaned children, we were detouring back to Tukombo Village to teach the women there how to make them - as a way to learn and practice practical craft-making skills.
A few months after my return to the United States, I officially launched Animals for Africa-Love Made Tangible and since then, dozens of caring and compassionate citizens happily hosted "Animal Art Parties," recruiting friends and raising funds to support the mission and vision.
The original crafting cooperative in Tukombo took root and the women began to meet weekly to make animals. Within four months they had earned $350, a substantial amount considering that over 90% of Malawians live on less than $750 a year! With funds earned through their own creative efforts, the women were able to reinvest in more crafting materials for the cooperative, provide a bit more food for their own families and to purchase school uniforms for seven of the orphaned children in their village so they could attend primary school.
With so much support from fans and friends, we were able to return to Malawi to develop and nurture the social enterprise we planted in Tukombo Village in May of 2011. We were also able to seed more crafting cooperatives through collaborations with the HALO Foundation and In Movement: Art for Social Change in Uganda.
We received a small grant from Art4Moore which helped pay for some crafting materials and lodging while in Africa for four weeks. We also raised $2,500 more through our IndieGoGo campaign, which helped cover plane tickets for two artist/educators to travel from San Francisco to Malawi, from Malawi to Uganda and from Uganda back to San Francisco. Additional donations and funds were collected to cover ground transportation, meals, and other travel-related expenses and we were able to bring additional crafting supplies to leave for women and youth so that they could continue developing their crafting cooperatives.
In its two years of active operations, Animals for Africa did succeed in its core mission-to empower people through creativity, connection, and love by bringing citizens of the world together to create simple, folk-art inspired stuffed animals for vulnerable children in need.
However, as its founder, I was unable to sustain the project long enough to fulfill its economic purpose due to events in my personal life.
Our long-range vision was to expand our artisan training and crafting campaigns to other countries and continents, to make more love tangible around the world. I am still committed to this vision, and to fostering community and connection through grass-root crafting circles, art education, workshops, and presentations with socially conscious collaborators and organizations.
So, if you are interested in using this concept or in developing a similar project for your organization, I would be happy to assist you. You can also support the much-needed mission of empowering people economically and creatively by starting your own transformative art project, or by donating to one of the other amazing initiatives listed in the comments below this post.
If you can't donate money as love, you can still help in many other incredibly impactful ways! You can get involved, volunteer, or become an "ambassador" simply by spreading the word about these organizations' and the empowering work they do!
http://www.voiceflame.org/
https://haloworldwide.org/
http://www.inmovement.org/
http://www.edirisa.org.uk/about-us/
http://womenswisdominitiative.org/
http://cerieastbay.org/web3/index.php
https://www.soroptimistinternational.org/
